The rapid expansion of digital cellular telephone expresses an urgent demand for mobility from the users and the necessity of the mobility support for telecommunication systems. Both ODP and TINA-C define the mobility support as an important requirement. However, both ODP and TINA-C assume in their original framework that the support of mobility is considered as a consequence of the support of the other distribution transparencies and, therefore, does not require any additional functions and mechanisms in the Distributed Processing Environment (DPE).
The present invention has been developed on the basis that access and location transparencies are not sufficient for supporting terminal and personal mobility. The main development of the present invention is based on considering mobility as an additional transparency and in order to do so there is according to the present invention proposed a Functional Separation Architecture wherein the mobility functions are separated from the network layer and the application (service) layer and grouped into a separate layer called the mobility layer.
The present invention has for its main object to suggest an implementation of realising such mobility layers, especially in connection with a so-called Generic Mobility System (GMS), whereby such a GMS will be designed and then introduced in the architecture transparency, i.e. applications although supported by the GMS are not aware of its existence.